How To Protect Yourself From DDoS Attacks

DDoS attacks – a short description

Basically DDoSing is flooding a website/ server or router by sending a lot of 'fake requests’. The computer will see these requests as ‘people who are trying to connect’, but actually it is a person/ multiple persons sending 'fake requests' to connect.

Because it doesn’t have to be hard to DDOS someone (there are multiple methods), it is a very common used and dangerous way to virtually ‘harm’ peoples network and businesses.

The 'man without a head'. | Source

Why do people actually DDoS?

Well, the sad truth is that people DDoS because they think it’s funny, or just want to take out a business competitor. Kids, teen, adults, they can all attack your network, most of the times without you even knowing it. A well known example of a group performing attacks is Anonymous. They have performed attacks on, for example, Paypal and Mastercard.

The symptoms of a being under a DDoS attack

You won’t be able to connect to your website. Double check if it isn’t a network problem by connecting to a well known site like Google or Yahoo.

Your amount of spam mails will increase drastically. This is called an ‘e-mail bomb’ or ‘mail bomb’.

Your internet connection will slow down drastically (over time). Again, make sure this isn’t a network problem by, for example, resetting the router.

How dangerous are these attacks?

The law is saying that DDoSing is illegal, right? Now take a look at this Wikipedia page:

Basically, this page is telling us people can DDoS without getting punished, unless they cause up to $5000 of damage… (the other stuff is quite unlikely to happen). In general, with the $5000 of damage, they mean ‘lost sales because of downtime’.

This quite sucks right? Well, it shouldn’t be too easy for people to DDOS someone...

Therefore people can’t DDoS a site/ network with just one computer (unless it is really small).

Another advantage is that DDoSers can’t steal/ access any files on your computer, or control/ destroy your device. Now don’t get too excited… there are other viruses which can totally mess up your computer.